


Still Worthy

by EjBlaKit



Category: Dredd (2012)
Genre: And unstealthily, Anderson loses her powers and it's not great, Captivity, Dredd can be stealthily protective, F/M, Medical Testing, Self-Doubt, That's probably a little bit more, Torture, working relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22284406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EjBlaKit/pseuds/EjBlaKit
Summary: 500 calls is the goal to get past, to prove to the Justice System that she is capable as a Judge.But Anderson doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want an arbitrary number to change the life she's good at.
Relationships: Cassandra Anderson & Joseph Dredd, Cassandra Anderson/Joseph Dredd
Comments: 14
Kudos: 66





	Still Worthy

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a fic I read yesterday by Silky_Octopus' 'You Should Have Read My Mind'.   
> Thoroughly enjoyed the tension in it, and the non-banging, which made me want to return to my Dredd roots and write a new fic for it.  
> So here we are!

He tilted his head ever so slightly, watching her. It wasn’t an assessing gaze, he’d been satisfied about her competence some time ago. He was merely observing as she rattled off the last of the violation codes and strung the perp up to the hitching post.

“What?” She finally asked, slightly unnerved. Dredd didn’t respond immediately, but then he rarely did, preferring to let people stew in their thoughts, recirculating over their recent actions until they were spitting out confessions for the most minor thing. Anderson didn’t do that, though. She was almost immune to the look, unless she knew she was in the wrong. At the moment she didn’t think she was, though. She sat astride her Lawmaster, chewing her bottom lip as she churned over the attempted hold up, her actions and assessments. Nothing had been amiss, she’d collared the suspects, provided assessment to headquarters, her helmet was at her side, weapon holstered. 

Dredd hadn’t moved from the doorway to the small fashion shop. It was neither a hint nor a help as to what he wanted. 

“You’re gonna have to use your words here,” she finally sighed, twisting slightly to better glare at him. They were twelve hours into their shift, and she was sweaty, hungry and tired. A flicker of almost amusement radiated off him as she snapped. 

“That was your five hundredth crime assessment,” he said.

“Didn’t realise you were counting,” she shot back, heart stuttering uncomfortably in her chest. They remained motionless for a long moment, the future suddenly short and brittle before her. 

“As your assessing officer,” he said, and she wanted him to shut up, to stop talking, get on his damned bike and respond to one of the nearby incidents so they could finish the day and go home. She hadn’t been counting on purpose, had let it fade into the background of the daily slog, of judgement, justice, of gruff silences and bland comments. They both knew what was ahead of her, a desk job with limited field work, a protected asset in the Hall of Justice.

It wasn’t the sort of help she wanted to enforce, the justice she preferred to enact. 

“There’s a reported homicide around the corner, perp fleeing on foot,” she said, trying to stop him. There was a hum in her ears that could have been her rising blood pressure. Dredd was still watching her, and then a slight incline of his helmet, a shift of the light playing across his visor, and he was gesturing her to lead the way.

It didn’t take long to catch the perp, meatwagon already inbound, and she’d found more crimes to attend, purposely running them ragged for the next five hours until they were in the parking lot, turning in their Lawmasters for updates and checks.

“Anderson,” he said, and she became hyper aware of just how silent he’d been all shift. She froze, already starting up the stairs to the exit. She just wanted to sleep. She didn’t want to have this conversation. The lip of her helmet dug into her fingers as her grip tightened, knuckles protesting. 

“Can we do this later?” She asked, not daring to look at him. If she did she’d be liable to do something stupid like call him a liar, or cry. It was an arbitrary number, it meant nothing. It should mean nothing.

“You’re a pass, Anderson.” His voice was flatter than usual. “Congratulations.” She heard his footsteps, familiar and heavy, as he approached, and then passed her. There was blood and dirt smeared on the back of his flak vest, where he’d landed on someone earlier in the day. She remained motionless until he’d vanished from her sight, the sound of him long since gone. Her inhalation stuttered, vision warping slightly, but a quick clear of the throat, shake of the head, and she stowed it all away until she was in the privacy of her own home where no one could see her, or judge her.

The congratulations kept flowing in. Everyone was a mixture of commiseration that she’d been forced into such extended contact with Dredd, and amazement that she’d survived and come out the other side. Her desk job was exactly as dull as she’d imagined, her colleagues nice but not all present, trying to get a read on her, to get a read on whoever they were chasing. Anderson kept herself closed to them, not unwilling to bond, but unwilling to let them taste her thoughts. It was a line she and Dredd had determined to keep uncrossed in the early days, since the interview room. Her gifts were an asset, not a reliability. She was first and foremost a street judge with the reflexes and instincts to back it up. 

Desk work wore that down though.

She went out on location under guard. Like they didn’t trust her to keep herself alive, like she hadn’t worked months with the man who attracted some of the toughest jobs. 

It was offensive and dull.

She worked shorter shifts, no over time, not that it was to much contention on her end, but the down time ate at her. She didn’t want to go out, she had no close friends, and if she did go out to let off steam, to party or dance the conduct would be deemed unbecoming of a Judge. So she sat in bed and went through the mission reports of other Judges. Ones she’d met in the field, but mostly she followed Dredd.

He was a tireless machine, working huge days with short snippets of down time. The reports stopped for the space of a month, he’d been downed in an explosion, forced into medical leave, but she was unable to see him. Not for lack of want, Headquarters seemed to want to keep her away. Wanted to keep her safe from the man that attracted death. Her shifts were doubled, she was rarely alone, and by the time she was free he was out again, somewhere in the vast streets of Mega City One causing mayhem. 

There was one thing her Superiors couldn’t protect her from, it turned out.

She was roaming the streets in civilian clothes, Lawgiver strapped to her thigh under her coat for safety, when she stumbled. The wave of dizziness had her clutching at the wall beside her, trying not to bring up the bile in her empty stomach. It passed quickly, but two steps further and she was almost doubled over with it, collapsing to the footpath, one palm pressed to her head, the other to her gut. The migraine was sudden, she couldn’t feel anyone around her, couldn’t see with her eyes squeezed shut. 

“Are you okay?” Someone bothered to ask, but she couldn’t answer, feeling everything flutter around her, as though she were experiencing everything through a film. Watching it happen instead of feeling it happen. “Lady?” That person again, barely audible over the roar of blood in her ears, the high pitched whine of reality fading out. 

When she opened her eyes again it was dark. 

She was not in the Hall of Justice.

She was not in her office.

She was not in a medical bay.

She was not at home.

Anderson moved her arm slightly, the motion limited by a restraint on her wrist. Her left arm proved the same, and then her ankles. She fought the instinct to call out, instead trying to reach out her feelers, to see what was around her in the dimly lit room with plain concrete walls and a ceiling lined with exposed wiring and pipes. Alarmingly she felt nothing. Not because there was nothing, but because she simply couldn’t feel it. Feel herself. That part of her that made her so effective was missing. 

Her weapon was no longer on her leg. Her coat was gone. But she was still dressed, and seemed wholly intact apart from her extra sense. 

“Hey,” she called out, feeling strangely useless and adrift. “Hey, I feel better, you can let me out now.” There was a groan from outside the scuffed door, the sound of metal on tile, then silence. “Hello?” She tried, louder, but there was nothing else to hear. So she pulled at the restraints, trying to work them free, loosen them. In the end she was tired and no closer to freedom. She had no idea how she’d come to be here, of how they’d caught her, or even why. She wasn’t part of any active case, nor had she been instrumental in any way to any recent convictions. She’d been looking for mutants, more like herself, that the Justice system could acquire and put to use. 

Hours went by, or minutes, she couldn’t be certain, just like she wasn’t sure if she’d slept or not, but the door finally groaned on its hinges, dragging her gaze from the maze of pipes above her, to the man in the doorway. The lab coat was filthy, stained along the sleeves, collar and hem. More hair seemed to be sprouting from under his disfigured nose than he had on his head.

“Miss Anderson?” He asked, glancing at paperwork in his hand. She frowned at him, wriggling her wrists a little, suddenly nervous. There was a man looking at her and she couldn’t sense anything from him. “Cassandra, I believe? I’ll call you Cass, that seems nice, yes.” He moved closer, the door shutting behind her. There was no click, but then a lock was hardly necessary when she couldn’t get up. 

“Where am I?” She asked, more demanded. 

“Hospital,” he said pleasantly. Perhaps he was trained medically, but she highly doubted he had a license or legal employment as any sort of medical professional. 

“I’m not sick,” she said, shifting as much as she could to the side of the bed opposite him. If he noticed, he didn’t mention it, coming to a stop beside her with a disturbingly bland smile. 

“I beg to differ Cass. We’ve been watching you for awhile. You’re very special.”

“You know I’m a Judge, then? That kidnapping me is a crime punishable by death.”

“Hardly,” he waved it away. “You collapsed, and now you’re resisting treatment.”

“I’m resisting unlawful restrainment,” she said, twisting her wrists again, and kicking her ankles so the chains clinked for good measure. “What did you do to me?”

“Cured you.” He said cheerfully. 

Those two words brought her world to a screeching halt.

“Excuse me?” She stared into brown eyes, watching thick eyebrows twitch in minute confusion.

“You’re cured, Cass. That’s what we do here. We cure our patients.”

“I wasn’t sick,” she said, knowing it to be a fact. She’d just had an annual check up. The only thing that could possibly be wrong with her was extreme boredom, and the examination didn’t test for that. From outside came a groan again, squeaking sounds, footsteps. 

“Another patient,” he said dismissively, fussing with her paperwork, before fixing that bland gaze on her again. “You were ill, an imbalance in your brain, but we’ve fixed it for you. You should be running at maximum efficiency, now.”

“Maxi-” Was this guy a droid? She scanned as much of him as she could, but no, he looked like a particularly rumpled and under qualified doctor. “What did you do?”

“You should probably get some rest,” he patted her knee and left her strapped down and angry. She thrashed, trying to pull free again, but all she managed to do was again wear herself out and leave her sweaty and aching. 

There was a straw in her mouth, urging her to drink, but she refused, mouth dry, throat sticking, twisting her head away. A cold compress on her forehead. Pricks in her elbow. She was in a hospital gown now, feeling weak and exhausted. How long had she been in that room? Days? Weeks? She felt the lack of activity in her muscles as she was led out of the room slowly, hands clutching a rolling frame. The nurse was old, grizzled and heavy set, a bear of a man. 

They slowly walked grey hallways with flickering lights. Somewhere someone was screaming. They passed no one else.

She slept unrestrained, was fed intravenously. She refused anything they gave her. 

And still she sensed nothing. Like they’d flipped a switch, turned her ability off. A gaping hole in her psyche, yawning wider and wider every day, her remaining senses unable to compensate. 

Vaguely she could recall being bored at her desk, wishing for more excitement. Greasy hair in her eyes, limbs splayed uselessly on the top of her bed, blanket lying on the floor in a tangle, she wished now for the mundanity. She wished she were at home, eating dried noodles, wished she were covered in someone else’s blood, chest heaving as Dredd gave her a dressing down for her unsafe conduct in a hostile zone, because where the drokk was her helmet? 

“When can I go?” Her words slurred as the balding, fuzzy doctor studied her over the top of his clipboard. 

“Go where?” He asked pleasantly, lifting her arm up and watching it flop to the bed. It jarred her shoulder as her wrist clipped the metal railing that stopped her from rolling off the sides, but she didn’t flinch, barely felt it. When had she felt something last? Something that meant anything at all. When had she been stronger than this?

“I want to go home,” it was said so plaintively, so unlike herself, but she wasn’t herself anymore, that was the point. She shouldn’t even be here. The arm he’d so recently held didn’t so much as twitch when she tried to move it. Nothing seemed to want to work the way she needed, as if her thoughts were no longer hardwired to the rest of her. 

“When you’re better,” he pushed the hair out of her eyes and patted her cheek. It was a clinical movement, with little meaning behind the motion. Almost as if he were reassuring himself that she was still warm, still alive. She hardly felt alive anymore, a shell, a moving corpse.

“You’ll be sentenced for this,” the words slurred and she could feel exhaustion’s familiar fingers digging deep and dragging her down. The doctor chuckled good naturedly. 

“They all say that,” he said.

When she woke up next she was strapped down again, tubes and wires piercing her skin. Blearily she watched as the nurse and doctor moved around her, taking readings, murmuring to one another. 

“You have other Judges,” she said sleepily. They both glanced at her, not pausing in the conversation as the nurse drew a needle and pressed it into her leg. She felt nothing. It should have worried her, may have once. “You can’t keep me here.”

“You’re free to leave,” the nurse said. She managed to feel something like surprise, having thought him mute. 

“Oh,” she said dumbly, but nothing wanted to move, so she lay there, and watched as they pressed more things into her flesh, as thin trickles of blood marred her skin, as new bruises were dug in. “I want -” she said, and left it open, hanging, because she was starting to hurt again, and she didn’t know. Was it her mother she wanted? Her father? Dredd? She had few people in this world, and most of them were dead.

There was something she wanted to say when she woke up, but she felt hungry, dehydrated, exhausted, like she’d worked 72 hours straight and Dredd was demanding her reports immediately. The words were there, but she couldn’t remember, couldn’t think. Everything hurt, was muddled and twisted. She rubbed tiredly at her face, fingers so bony against her skin, cracked and flaking around her nails. 

Something clattered outside her door. Her partially open door. 

Lights flickered, cracked and dying bulbs, the scene of a horror vid. 

Her lips split as she opened her mouth, calling out soundlessly. 

The sounds of shouting, cut off quickly. A scream. The thud of boots. A familiar ricochet of bullets. A shadow passed by the small gap, fleeting but large. 

Still no voice when she tried to call out, to draw attention to herself.

She rubbed at her face again, and froze.

She could move.

She could move again.

The world spun alarmingly when she sat up, but steadied itself by the time she’d managed to wriggle her way to the edge of the bed, sweat beading on her skin despite the fact she felt like she hadn’t had fluid in months. 

Standing was going to be a bad idea. She knew it before she did it, but she tried anyway. The ground met her hard and fast, knees slamming into cold tile as her legs buckled. So she dragged herself slowly to the door instead, which proved to be almost as impossible as walking. Almost, but not quite.

Gunfire and shouting drew a lot closer in the agonising minutes it took her to cross those few metres, and by the time she finally nudged the door open she saw a solo figure stalking through the corridor, heading towards her room.

It was a silhouette she knew, could pick up in the dimmest lighting. She tried to call his name, mouth open, the exhalation so soft it was barely a breath, but he seemed to sense her anyway, head tilting, then snapping in her direction.

Dredd.

A gloved hand dug into hair that seemed far too long, yanking back until her face was exposed. 

Anderson didn’t cry, but it was a close thing, looking up into that visor, at that stern chin and scowl, at the familiar scars etched into the metal of his helmet.

“Anderson.” He said, and there was faint wonder there, lips twisting into something like shock, and she didn’t like that look on him. She tried to say his name again, but her whole body sagged when he released his hold on her head, almost sprawling her to the ground. His boots were covered in concrete dust and something that looked like blood lined the treads. He was shifting, kneeling beside her, then his arm was under hers, around her shoulders, hoisting her up. Trying to help her walk, but that lasted for only a moment before he hauled her completely up and against his side like she weighed nothing. She probably didn’t.

She stared at the worn fabric of his vest, head lolling against his neck. All she wanted to do was sleep again. But she didn’t want to close her eyes in case this was all a horrible vivid dream, in case she woke up to the Doctor and the tubes. 

“Alright Anderson,” Dredd said, his voice sounding gruffer than usual, though it was hard to recall exactly whether that was fact or fancy. She chose fancy. Dredd was never ruffled, he was a stone, solid and unmoving. “We have no back up, there’s an enormous riot two sectors over, so it’s just us. I’ve subdued five men so far, found multiple victims. Who else is there?” 

He’d said five, but that didn’t make sense. She drew back and stared into his visor, though it seemed to be distorting strangely, as if her head was wobbling. She tried to imitate his frown, but settled on shaking her head vaguely and holding up two fingers.

“There were five so far,” he assured her. “Where am I going?” She stared at him another moment, before even that was too tiring and she let herself drop against him again. He stank like the streets, and like sweat. It was familiar, comforting in an odd way. In a before way. Before all this. When she’d been herself. “Anderson,” he said after a relatively long time for him to be standing in an active crime scene with perps on the loose. “I’m gonna have to put you down. I’ll come back though,” he said, and it sounded almost comforting, which was ridiculous. 

It was only when she was leaning against the wall that she realised she was crying, which was even more ridiculous. The only good thing at that very moment was that she couldn’t talk, because she would have been begging him to stay, to not leave her alone. She had proved herself field worthy once, and now she was embarrassing herself. 

He paused long enough to grunt at what he saw of her, and then strode away, Lawgiver drawn once again, vanishing into a haze that was broken only by sobs, by someone whining. Gun shots, shouting. Her bones ached. Footsteps drawing closer, the creak of leather, a hand against her face, carefully tilting her to look up into that visor, that concerned frown again.

“Med’s on the way,” he said, “and the meat wagons.” He shifted and picked her up again, both hands this time. “Drokk,” he muttered. Then he began to walk, and she watched as they traversed corridors, past rooms filled with people strapped to beds. Some moved, most didn’t. “This one?” He asked, kicking something. She looked down and shook her head, not recognising this man in the lab coat. She nodded three corpses later when they found the nurse. The last one was in an office. They could hear back up downstairs, because they’d climbed two more levels of this hell. 

Her fingers dug into the familiar grooves of his chest plating as she tried to get away from that crooked nose, dull brown eyes unseeing, moustache splattered with blood. 

“This one.” He said nodding. Then he took her down to an army of familiar helmets and flashing lights. 

They asked her questions, as they began to prod and poke, but eventually called for sedation as she began to fight them, struggling as much as she could, no longer in the protective shell of Dredd’s arms. He’d left her with them and gone back to work.

She awoke in a bed, strapped down wrists and ankles.

The ceiling was white. 

The room was filled with empty beds.

Before Anderson could really translate this to familiarity, she was already thrashing, pulling so hard she felt a snap in her wrist. That didn’t stop her kicking, or the panicked moan escaping her throat. A machine behind her began to beep frantically, a hiss, and then everything dulled and she fell asleep again.

“Get up.”

Anderson waded through the murkiness, clawing her way to that voice.

“You need to give her some time,” another familiar voice said, “she’s still very weak.”

“Anderson,” Dredd used her name as an order, and she struggled to obey. 

“Sir, with all due respect, you really don’t know what you’re dealing with.” That second voice was respectfully pissed, and if she wasn’t so lost, so tired, so still mildly unconscious, she would have laughed. 

“Anderson.” He sounded pissed now, and she snapped her eyes open, looking at that white ceiling again. She caught the edge of a smug smirk that vanished the moment she fully registered the two men beside her. Her boss looked pissed, and Dredd looked … normal, street filthy and worn. 

“Sirs,” she said, and then almost stopped breathing entirely as she was wracked with an enormous coughing fit. Someone shoved a cup in her hand as it eased off, and she sipped it cautiously. Just water. The machine behind her beeped once and went silent. 

“Anderson,” her boss said, gripping the railing of her bed tightly, hovering over her. “You’ve been gone for a long time.”

“How-” she rasped, unable to complete the sentence, but he seemed to understand well enough. As he should, considering he was head of the PSI division. 

“Five months,” he said, and patted her knee. “There was no footage, nothing. We had you leaving your apartment, and then all camera evidence of you vanishes.”

“They thought you ran,” Dredd said, arms folded over his chest, looking as though he’d rather be smashing heads in than standing by her sick bed. 

“Never,” she sipped desperately at the almost empty cup, willing her throat to work, her voice to kick fully back into gear. 

“We had no evidence otherwise. You were just gone, none of us could find you. We assumed you were blocking yourself. You hadn’t been yourself just before you vanished, it was the only logical explanation.” Anderson looked to Dredd again, and even though she could no longer sense where his eyes were behind the visor, she knew they shared a connected moment of ‘desk jockeys’. “Then Dredd here reported having found you in a drug bust. What were we to think?”

“That one of yours was taken by force and tortured?” Dredd offered dryly. “If we’re done here, now,” he added, turning to leave. 

“I suppose Cassandra needs to rest,” he nodded, patting her knee again. She grit her teeth, trying not to squirm away. She’d seen the doctor dead on the ground. This was not him, this was her boss. 

To her surprise, once he’d preceded Dredd out of the room, Dredd closed the door and turned back to her, leaving them alone amongst the empty beds. 

“Drug bust?” She asked skeptically, staring at him from across the room. A muscle in his cheek twitched, and she fancied she could hear the creak of his leather gloves from here as they curled into fists. 

“I’m having you reassigned for re-evaluation,” he said, not moving any closer. She shrugged her shoulders, not trusting her voice on any of the words she wanted to say. He seemed to understand well enough. They didn’t need her kind of telepathy to communicate silently. “Desk duty made you soft, Judge. I’m putting you back on the street under my watch, make sure you can still do your job.”

It shouldn’t have been such a relief, especially after what she’d been through. But it was. To prove herself, to make a difference again, or die trying, instead of dying strapped to a bed. 

And she was crying again.

Dredd grunted, watching her, clearly uncomfortable.

“They’ll tell me when you’re cleared for duty.” He said, and left.

She did not do well.

Rehab was a nightmare of drug cocktails and physio drills.

She was shot three times in her first week back on the street. Every time Dredd would either pull out the bullet and drag her to medical, or let them do it, wait for them to patch her up, and then take her back out again. She was tased once, pushed down a flight of stairs on multiple occasions, and was even thrown from a building. 

Her first arrest was three weeks later, an old woman using her cats as drug mules, which would have been clever if her apartment and the streets around it weren’t riddled with cats dead from overdosing. The sweet little old lady put up no fight and went easily with a full confession. 

Dredd watched on, the silent sentinel he’d been in her very early days as a rookie. It had stressed her out endlessly then, now she just felt like a failure.

Her first high speed chase found her wiped out in a barricade.

“PSI division keeps demanding your return,” Dredd said as they sat on an overpass, camped out for speeding violations. It wasn’t lost on her that he’d been picking minor tasks to occupy their shifts, and she was still failing abysmally. “You haven’t told them.”

“Told them what?” She asked, but he levelled his glare on her, letting the computer on his Lawmaster take over on scanning passing vehicles. One of them caught and flared an alarm, but he silenced it without looking, not going after the offender in favour of interrogating her. 

“You were a pass, Anderson. You were given to me on a fail margin because of what you had, and now its gone.” 

“Yeah,” she said, looking out over the city, at the heavy clouds sitting between the mega blocks. The weather stations were acting up, and the city had been in perpetual darkness for half a week already. 

“Why haven’t you reported it?”

“I’m just … trying to do my job.”

“You can’t do your job with half a brain,” he said, and it wasn’t unkind. He was perhaps the only one who seemed to understand. The Doctors hadn’t even noticed when doing the scans and tests on her, nothing seemed to show up that anything about her was remotely wrong. She’d been subjected to high doses of unidentified drugs and heavy sedatives, but that was all they’d told her. 

“Why were you really there?” She asked instead, clearing her throat because she’d been in a frustratingly perpetual state of tears since she’d been rescued. It infuriated her to feel so weak and helpless, useless. “It wasn’t a drug bust.”

“No.” He said, silencing another alarm. He shifted slightly in his seat, no longer looking at her, but over the intersecting roads that stretched out before and below them. “There were drugs, gave people bursts of telepathy. Increased murders and minor theft cases.” He silenced another two alarms, before turning the system off completely. Anderson watched him in surprise. “Reminded me of you,” he said after a long pause. “You’d already been missing a month, looked into a rise in missing muties, lower ranked Judges with weak abilities, civilians, vanishing off the street.” Car lights played over his visor, casting his lower face in deeper shadow as from somewhere in the seething mass of clouds above them thunder rolled. 

“They were using us to make drugs?” She asked, feeling sick. “How is that even possible?”

“Killed everyone that could’ve answered that.” He sounded pleased about it, and she found she was pleased. “Only fifteen of you got out alive,” he continued.

“Is it pity?” She asked as rain began to pelt the sidewalk, big fat drops that felt like ice through her layers. “Is that why you reassigned me?”

He didn’t answer her until the end of the shift, as they stood under an awning, eating food from a nearby vendor, helmets and leathers protecting them from the worst of the storm's fury. 

“You needed to get back out and prove yourself,” he said, startling her into dropping half the reconstituted vegetable filling onto her boots. “It’s not pity, and you haven’t been a fail yet.” That yet hung heavy between them. But she found herself trying harder, to navigate the world like a normal person who’d never been able to read other people, to slip into their heads and preempt their decisions. 

It was tough, but she was getting the hang of it. Her injuries became more reasonable to her line of work, deserved instead of stupid. Dredd had to watch her less and less, their assignments becoming gradually harder. Until one shift she fell off a balcony, or was shoved to be more precise.

She hit concrete hard, winding herself and bruising her ribs, her helmet skittering away. Which was ridiculous, because Dredd’s helmet somehow remained permanently attached to his skull. She secretly suspected superglue, but it was hard to prove. Stars exploded in her skull, and she crawled painfully slow to her lid, reaching to put it on when she felt something. A slight twinge. Her hand paused, hovering over red and black, and she found herself turning her head slightly, glancing up at the balcony, where Dredd had detained the perp. He wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t even focused on her, despite the fall. 

But she could feel him.

Whisper thin.

Restrained rage.

Familiar.

Anderson pushed herself up onto her arse, sitting on the ground, head tilted as she reached out carefully, brushing. The perp, a sour mix of pissed and terrified. A family huddled behind a deserted food stall some five metres from her position. She looked down at the helmet in her lap, something like hope bubbling in her chest.

A hand was thrust into her face, scuffed and starting to grey. She looked up and took Dredd’s offer, letting him haul her up to her feet. 

He looked her up and down, grunted, and clapped her on the shoulder. 

“You’re a pass,” he said, somehow knowing. 

She grinned.


End file.
